


Clara, Boxed Girl

by Radiolaria



Series: Meta Essays [8]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Archived From Tumblr, Archived From onaperduamedee Blog, Canonical Character Death, Death, Fanwork Research & Reference Guides, Gen, Literary References & Allusions, Meta Essay, Mythology References, Nonfiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-09
Updated: 2018-12-09
Packaged: 2019-09-15 04:40:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,535
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16926678
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Radiolaria/pseuds/Radiolaria
Summary: An analysis of the importance of boxes in Clara's story until S8.





	1. Part 1: Intro and Of Ballerinas

**Author's Note:**

> Originally published on Mar. 14, 2014 on [onaperduamedee](https://onaperduamedee.tumblr.com/post/79571132099/meta-clara-boxed-girl-part-1-intro-and-of).
> 
> (Note: What I attempted to do here is merely a symbol orientated analysis of Clara’s arc. In no way it is a straight, definitive interpretation of Steven Moffat and his team’s writing concerning the character. Consider it a re-reading of Clara in light of a restriction in themes –in this case, boxes. It is a choice I made because I thought the interpretations prompted were of interest.
> 
> For length reasons, the different episode titles used will be written in their entirety at first, then only referred to as initials, e.g. TS for The Snowmen, TDotD for The Day of the Doctor, etc. Fortunately, throughout Clara’s era, no episode shares the same acronym.)

>  CLARA: I know the perfect box.

 

Snog boxes, glass boxes, image boxes, corpse boxes, ice boxes, monster boxes.... Boxes are aplenty in Clara’s era.

Thematically, boxes always hide or protect their content; a treasure or a threat. They have an inside and an outside.

Around Clara, boxes contain either oblivion (the memory worm in The Snowmen, the big box of death “planet smashing bomb” in Nightmare in Silver, the Doctor’s time stream for Clara in The Name of the Doctor, the Moment) or memories (the bow tie in The Bells of Saint John, the Ice Warrior held in a block in Cold War, the bottled Gallifreyan encyclopaedia in Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS, the time stream again for the Doctor). Boxes contain monsters (The Rings of Akhaten, CW, JttCotT, The Day of the Doctor) or offer escape from them (the TARDIS in TRoA, then in Hide, Tasha’s teleport in The Time of the Doctor). In some cases, they help conceal a secret or a trick: Porridge cheating at chess in NiS, Tricky and his “synthetic voice box” in JttCotT, the Vortex Manipulator preserved in a glass box, the stasis cube used to enter paintings in TDotD.

To the Doctor, Clara is all of those: the ultimate “trick”, “trap” and treasure, before he discovers she is his paramount _safe-keeper_. He never thought of it; he had a home-box that was a message, Pandorica that was a trap, a lift that was a teleport, cubes, but never a safe. He expects her to be his demise, to hold memories of another girl, to be the girl who “died both times”, to be impossible. The Doctor sees Clara as a Chinese puzzle box: a pretty object one has to open and search for a treasure. In fact, he discovers Clara is a Rubik’s cube: she is nothing but a cube made of cubes as it was evident in the first place. Once solved, no secret panel will open: she would just appear with six plain coloured sides, all comprising of smaller squares. They had been there all along, different angles of the same face.

But Clara is much more than what she is to the Doctor; she could be interpreted as another kind of box altogether.

 

**Of ballerinas, flying off stage:**

The very first image we have of Clara is a music box in which a ballerina dances to Carmen’s Habanera. Clara does the voice over, recording on her Dictaphone. The Habanera corresponds to Carmen’s first appearance on stage in the opera. This is Clara stating quite boldly _she_ is the heroine. Later in the same episode, Amy sees a tiny dancer who turns out to be a Dalek. And Oswin is revealed to be a Dalek.

There is a level of reading in which Clara is a ballerina madly spinning in a music box.

It’s dramatic, romantic, melancholic, but most of all, it’s strong as an ox though displaying a general harmless appearance. And Clara is a “bubbly personality masking bossy control freak” after all. The environment is set, controlled, the dance always defined. By definition, ballerinas play a role; they are never simply dancing. They are Giselle or Raymonda or soloist one in modern pieces, still constantly in character. The ballerina, like the actress, is the woman of a thousand faces.

Clara is the boxed girl, the dancer. She put herself in certain frames and chose the tune: the heroine, the nanny, the explorer, the pixie, just like Miss Montague chose to endorse two personalities and jobs at once, or Clara named herself Oswin and “Impossible Girl”. Clara narrates her life. As Oswin, the trapped castaway imagines she is fighting vampires. As Miss Montague, the governess enjoys telling her charges of incredible stories in which _she_ plays the lead –born behind Big Ben. The Snowmen is the story of governess Clara herself becoming the heart of a fairy story, with Snowmen and Ice governess. And the first time we met our Clara, she is not afraid of ghosts... Miss Clara and the Snowmen, Oswin and the vampire Daleks, Clara and the ghosts... Nice title for a ballet.

Telling stories about _herself_ from the beginning, Clara has always been made of “echoes”, in the form of duplicates of herself that would go on adventures, even stuck in a shuttle, even simple governess.

The trouble with ballerinas and music boxes is that the ballerina only dances when inside. They barely stand on one leg without their base, let alone dance. And Clara is viscerally afraid of losing balance, getting lost, which tends to happen when you get out. Yet she cannot wait to be shown the stars and step into the TARDIS. Likes control and balance, yearns to fly by herself... Here lies a characteristic essential to Clara and that could be summed up by a simple image: the ballerina of the beginning is dancing to _opera_. The music doesn’t match her dance and comes from the _outside_.

Because Clara is constantly trying to cross and go beyond:

  * Throughout series seven, Clara is constantly locked outside the TARDIS in Akhaten, in Hide, in TTotD (out of Tasha’s chambers as well); or inside the ship in JttCotT and in TNotD. Generally, she wants to change sides;
  * In AotD, Clara chose to go out of what she’d become, at the cost of her life. Without forgetting her expressed desire to see the stars or be remembered –directed at the Doctor and the audience;
  * Hide: A good part of the episode revolves around getting inside a pocket Universe to save the Doctor;
  * The Crimson Horror: Clara is put in a box to be rendered back to flesh;
  * TNotD: Clara and the Doctor spend a long time trying to get in. Once inside the tomb, she is trapped and lost in the time stream;
  * TDotD: pocket Universes and glasses, crossing and breaching are essential to the plot. Clara holds a conversation with the Doctor across time thanks to the wormhole and in the Tower via stone. It is Clara who opens the door no one had thought of opening in the Tower. Clara also becomes the epitome of death to life passage: Gallifrey comes back from the dead, by crossing Universe.
  * TTotD: Clara locked outside the blue box again, but her determination to travel realms without the box’s agreement is so strong that the TARDIS is forced to extend her field to the outside.



So Clara is good at travelling? Not exactly. One has to take into consideration the fact that with Clara distinct environments and states are confused:

  * AotD: Clara is dead, but keeps on _dreaming_ she is stuck inside the shuttle, when dreaming should have allowed her to escape. She doesn’t know who or where she is;
  * TS: Clara is both governess and barmaid, between two worlds. The magic blue box would have allowed her to shed her dichotomy: no longer nanny or barmaid, she would have become acompanion. She has a counterpart dead in the water, trapped under ice, reaching out to take her place. Later, she is briefly resurrected, although still dead.
  * TBoSJ: in which Clara ends up either inside flickering boxes, while her body is asleep. Taken by a snog-box and her travelling Time Lord, she doesn’t accept immediately to travel with him despite her desire to see the world: not in or out;
  * CW: in a sinking coffin, Clara _wakes up_ from the magic adventures she had been having with the Doctor and becomes aware of how people can die;
  * Hide: Clara watches from _inside_ the TARDIS while the Doctor is out exploring and realises people are all ghosts to the Doctor;
  * JttCotT: Clara lives in the box –she has spare clothes there- and a version of her future self dies inside.;
  * TCH: Clara is held under a glass, paralysed, still conscious, arranged to seem _suspended in life._
  * TNotD: Asleep and travelling in time. In the time stream, Clara should be dead in the present, but is very much alive in the Doctor’s past.  Her identity is lost: “I don't even know who I am.”



The crossing is successful each time. But not because she has the ability to cross. Rather because she is _on both sides_ at once: dreaming and dead; in the past and the present; awake and alive. Clara doesn’t match her environment, appears to display a decoy with the _appearance of life_ to one side _,_ precisely because she is everywhere at once _._ Oh, cool. Except it’s really not, and being so squared, divided and occupied by echoes the way she is, it is no wonder she splintered in time. The confusion between worlds, the establishment of a limit is complex with Clara. In some cases she voluntarily places herself in both worlds: the land of stories and reality. But interestingly, most of the time, she doesn’t know where she is. This last confusion makes every attempt to go out or in all the more risky for her.

For example: obviously Oswin should not be able to have a hold on anything happening outside her sphere of control – the shuttle, which she controls absolutely, eggs and milk included, since she is in a dream world. Yet Clara is still dancing to a tune coming from _outside_ by upsetting _herself_ the order she had set inside when the Daleks besieges her. Or is it so? Oswin is visited _nightly_ by the Daleks, at a time when she should be dreaming, when she already is dreaming, which means the Dalek in her is actually implanted deeply _inside_ , more subconsciously than the human remains. It’s not Oswin who retreated deep into her mind to protect herself, it’s the Dalek who is blocked in by her humanity. It makes sense since the process of turning someone into a Dalek consists of wiping the human clean and using their brain power, then of re-uploading the memories inside, hacking competence included. In this manner, Clara is the one _besieging_ the Dalek, keeping it locked in and stopping it from taking control from the outskirts of her mind –cf. Tasha Lem. She has no idea how in control she is. Or out of control: the point of Dalek!Oswin is that she was a faulty converted Dalek: a genius worthy of conversion but the human part preventing any use. Dalek!Oswin never left the Asylum to serve her glorious Dalek Empire; she was declared dead at birth. Oswin is an insane, schizoid Dalek. That is why she is shackled. Oswin is not at her place on either side. She is in control of herself, but not of her ability to perceive correctly her environment.

And she broke out of herself, the only way that could destroy any environment, by death. It will be of importance later.

In the end, Clara is a woman outside and inside boxes, between worlds. She is not sure of the side she is on or whether she wants to be inside or outside. Dreaming or awake? Dead or alive? Inside or outside? Past or present? In-universe or out-of-universe? She would rather dance to a tune coming from outside, obey to rules that do not pertain to where she moves at the moment. Hence her desire to breach, take a peek, eventually cross. But the jump to one side definitely is not easy to make.

Why is it so? Because she is in her twenties? Because she is taken by “spleen”? Wanderlust and would always try to go beyond? It may be a bit more complicated. Because if she is has a potential for unreliable ubiquity, hesitating between worlds, she is also _shallow,_ as all boxes are. 


	2. Emptying And Metamorphosis In The Time Stream

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Orginally published on Mar. 14, 2014 on [onaperduamedee](https://onaperduamedee.tumblr.com/post/79590353258/meta-clara-boxed-girl-part-2).

 

**Emptying and metamorphosis in the time stream:**

Clara’s era, so far, has been one of lapses and emptiness, absent people and objects –[see this video](http://onaperduamedee.tumblr.com/post/67362080094/mad-november-17-favourite-arc-ghosts-and). The arc of series 7 has not been weaving threads around Clara, but around ghosts and echoes, voices being ignored. The Doctor was unable to distinguish echoes from real voices –Clara’s or River’s. Halls were always filled with echoes (Hide, JttCotT, TCH). It emphasizes all the more the emptiness throughout the series:

  * The Dalek was a shell in which Clara’s body was no longer in AotD. The episode also introduces the Daleks turning humans into puppets  –again in TTotD;
  * Clara in TBoSJ was twice rendered an empty shell;
  * The Rings of Akhaten focuses on stories _taken from_ the people to keep asleep the Sun God;
  * Cold War: in a sinking coffin, Clara tries to have a conversation with an empty armour;
  * In Hide, someone is flickering in a dying Universe and one should not overlook the striking modelling the Doctor fashioned in balloons to explain how the bubble Universe would deflate;
  * Nightmare in Silver depicts people being emptied and turned into Cyberman puppets. Porridge in an ominous trick animates an “empty” Cyberman head to play chess;
  * Clara’s favourite treat is all about lightness and air: a _soufflé_ –also the _soufflé_ is the name of the pot used to bake it. Yeap, Russian dolls in baking.



Herself, Clara seems built on emptiness. Within the show, she loses consciousness or dies quite often (AotD, TS, TBoSJ, CW, JttCotT, TCH, TNotD). The direction visually _represents_ those consciousness losses at least twice: in CW, when Clara drowns and for a moment we follow her blurry point of view; in TNotD, when Clara jumps into the time stream and is caught in what looks like a cylinder of time. But it goes even further than that: there are blank years on the first page of her book, blank memories (her echoes), blank times when she does not travel with the Doctor. In the Ponds’ era, the blanks were filled by the _originals_ : Amy found her parents, her Rory, her child even, her Doctor in the end. Amy’s last erasure is of herself, but works as filling _correctly_ a blank: Amy should always be “with the Rory”.

On the contrary, people and things are permanently lost to Clara: her mother, her leaf, even her room (in the minisode _Clara and the TARDIS_ , though I do hope she got another one), herself in the time stream, her Doctor at last. And she can’t have them back. Because her life is not impossible as Amy’s was, despite being “the Impossible Girl”. The thing with Clara is that she is _not_ a fairy tale character, despite her stories; she is fragile and human, and her echoes die like flies. Clara is not a creator, but a _protector_. The rules she sets for herself, for her characters, force her story to make sense, go straight, follow the narration canvas. She cannot “recreate” what was lost, by going back and rewinding. She will not take the Ponds’ or Mrs. Maitland’s place. She can only protect it for as long as she holds onto it –cf. her protectiveness towards the Doctor.

(One could argue that Clara helped rewrite the Time War end and Trenzalore, but we cannot know for sure this has not been the way it was supposed to happen all along. And we may not have seen the last of Trenzalore.)

In a way, the moment Clara jumped into the time stream, she lost _her selves_. She had been twirling and dancing for half a series, a leaf, hesitating between directions, between incarnations, between genres and environments  –Clara _is_ different in each episode and it did threw me off at first. In dreams interpretation, the leaf often represents the beginning of a transformation cycle. The state is by definition transitory since after its free fall, the leaf is bound to find the floor and rot –or be picked up and left to dry. Autonomy and freedom are only reachable once bounds are broken and being is really only becoming, over and over again. There is no in-between, no possibility to preserve oneself in the current state once the fall is started.

In TNotD, Clara touched the ground, and a ground that belonged nowhere: dream, life, death, memories, out of time, etc. What was the scar tissue of the Doctor’s travels exactly? An absence. The place where there was no _body_. And Clara landed there. A ballerina out of her box stops dancing. No more roles to play, no more Victoria or Kitri. They all acquired their autonomy and went on to save the Doctor. Clara did her “big damn hero” thing, she jumped and got lost. She was supposed to die, but instead finding herself alive and nowhere, no one, emptied of herself, she panicked. Brief sudden metaphorical existential crisis and that is probably accurate for many twenty-somethings.

Technically, Clara should have been torn apart by the Time winds. But precisely because she was haunted with so many stories –Clara had lives unlived, invented, dreamed-, something of her remained in the Time stream, even emptied. As Oswin could not be entirely deprived of her humanity –her insanity-, as the leaf was too much to be consumed by the Sun God, Clara was not erased; on the outskirts remained the leaf – freedom, blank page, a thin separation between outside and inside, but enough to hold her together –“This is you, Clara. Everything you were or will be”.

Her “story is done”, not as if Clara had nothing waiting for her, but as if Clara had no more stories to tell about _herself_. Did Clara step out of a bovarysm stage in TNotD? Probably. All the women she aspired to be, all of them super heroines –most of them could have been the Innuendo Squad’s secret child-, were gone, leaving her with an empty shell that is herself, her core. Not completely empty, since at the bottom of Pandora’s box, when all the scourges had left, hope remained. But also, finally, Clara was handed –by herself- a clean slate that would allow the _building_ of a woman that would _be_ all Clara –less Mary Poppins, less Jack Harkness. Empty, she can start filling her book with travels rather than dreams, and living them.

But the transformation, the leaf falling, the heroines discarded, happened within a very specific environment: a tomb. In Clara’s era, tombs and corpses are all empty – the Doctor’s, River’s, the GI himself, the Zygon paintings, the spot where Gallifrey was. In the Ponds’s era, people were in their grave, painfully. Clara-music box lost her ballerina. Not a problem. Bodies are boring anyway. Her purpose is only changing, the metamorphosis allowing her to step into another level.

“I'm everywhere. You're inside my time stream. Everything around you is me,“ says the Doctor, but could say Clara. He had been all his life up to this point wrapped in Clara’s multiple echoes.


	3. Becoming A Vessel

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally published on Mar. 14, 2014 on [onaperduamedee](https://onaperduamedee.tumblr.com/post/79590519934/meta-clara-boxed-girl-part-3).

Once closed, once emptied, every box holds darkness in its belly, death. As such, boxes become coffins and sarcophagi, vessels for the last travel. [Cue Clara, angel of death](http://onaperduamedee.tumblr.com/post/70833044422/in-certain-islam-traditions-azrael-is-the-angel). And cross beyond she does, a lot. Clara is used to stepping on graves:

  * Oswin is first seen in a retirement home that looks an awful lot like a graveyard for Daleks;
  * Clara’s very first appearance on screen is besides Miss Clara Oswald’s grave;
  * Clara jumps inside the Doctor’s grave;
  * Oswin visits the Library, of all places visited by the Tenth incarnation, Pr. Song’s grave –infested with flesh-eating creatures, literally _sarco-phagein._
  * Without forgetting ghosts are constantly mentioned around her, in relation to her...



Of all the environments she found herself into, trapped or thrown, death is probably the one she seems the less out of place –the Doctor seems almost happy to realise in TS Clara died both times.

Amy stepped into the looking glass with great ease. In fairy tales no one really dies because the story itself ensures immortality. And the Ponds’ era was woven with stories. With Clara, death is all around. This series was filled with them: four Claras (AotD, TS, JttCotT, TNotD), two Doctors (TNotD, JttCotT), all the Ponds (*laughs*), twice the Great Intelligence, Ellie Oswald, the Sun God, Russian sailors, the van Baalen brothers, Mrs Gillyflower, Captain Alice Ferrin, Strax, Jenny, Tasha Lem, Handles... That’s two per episode if one doesn’t count The Angels Take Manhattan in which Clara does not appear. And they are not all antagonists. Some of them were rewritten. Some of them definitive.

But this heavily death-permeated climate is not depicted as something that is completely negative. Clara is everywhere at once. So where Clara is linked with death, she is also with life. Series 7 opens with a divorce and a death – I don’t need to underline how disturbingly powerful is the theme of infertility linked to Clara, daughter, trapped in a shell and dead without knowing it- and closes in a graveyard. It also opens on the rebirth of a marriage and closes on the Doctor being saved.

That’s why when Clara discarded her selves and saved all the Doctors, she becomes a medium between life and death – a coffin. She protects whatever she holds within and ensures its safe delivery to wherever it is expected. Through Clara, the audience understands at last that River Song has been dead for a very long time, but she also enables the Doctor to make contact with her a last time.

More to that, there is a sort of thermodynamic of the being, and precisely of vital energy. Allowing the crossing has a cost:

  * In AotD, Clara discovers she is dead and a Dalek; choosing to regain her humanity means dying again;
  * The ice governess coming out, crossing the delimitation between life and death, will eventually bring Clara’s death, coincidentally by falling out of another box. Tears killing the Great Intelligence;
  * Clara giving her mother’s unlived moments to save the Doctor;
  * In CW, when it is revealed the Ice warrior is out of his box, hell ensues and Clara displays her first genuine moment of fear, discovering that people die during the Doctor’s magic adventures around the world;
  * In Hide, Clara crosses world to reach a universe Emma Grayling thought to be death;
  * In TCH, Clara is put in a box to be rendered back to life;
  * In TNotD, her deaths were the price for saving the Doctor and stepping inside his life.



Would Clara be Charon? Not remotely. She doesn’t travel, _doesn’t cross_ strictly speaking – Vastra and Jenny, Mrs. Kislet are living proofs one can travel in time inside one’s body. Everything works as if Clara _herself_ ensures equilibrium and separation between the two worlds. Coffin girl.

As such, she can only catch glimpses of what was lost and superimpose two distinct worlds: her Doctor as he delays the regeneration, her own echoes in dreams, her mother’s life in the leaf, the leaf in the dream-world scar tissue of the Doctor’s travel. The walls are thin though: exterior can be leaking inside (Cold War, JttCotT) or interior outside (TNotD, TDotD). And Clara knows this – she lost all of her echoes through cracks in herself. In trying to bring together two worlds, only stories and words can somehow soften the borders without breaking the partition. So when Clara is trying to reach, Clara does not use her imagination, she talks; she is the voice guiding the Doctor in the Asylum, she gives the word “pond” to Vastra, she pleads for the Doctor’s life. Amy, named like a fairy tale, future story, has always belonged _to the land of stories_. It is a domain of control, reason, immortality, or at least that provides immortality – memories of her mother, another set of regenerations for the Doctor.

Clara is a box girl. At the core of Clara is the ability to reach across–an essential quality for a teacher- not because she is a ghost, but because she is the partition, the point of contact between the worlds, the box. She is, in Miss Montague’s form, the transition between the Ponds and Clara. In Oswin’s body, the transition between the audience and the story. Breaking into a million pieces as she saves the Doctor, she would nonetheless remember this event as a dream, becoming herself what separates her dream from the Doctor’s and her echoes’ reality.

One face looking out, one face looking in, and always in a different direction: present and past, dream and reality, story and life, etc. She is not omniscient, but has caught glimpses of all of the Doctor’s life. She used to be the dancer, the hero of the story. Her story? Not anymore. Because Clara is not Amy, the writer, or River, the definitive auto-biographer. Clara applies to real life canvases and patterns found in fiction to give order to life, because fiction has to make sense, life doesn’t. If anything, up until TNotD, she is still a student –literary students do not always make great writers.

The following specials introduced a Clara who is very much the teacher. Her breaking seemed to have been needed to make space for the Doctor. Of course the Doctor made space for her as well, discarding the mystery. Yet, in emptying herself of all the echoes, stories of all the women she could have been and wanted to be, she allowed the Doctor to take this place and become thoroughly her charge.

The last images we have of Eleven are immensely childish –fish fingers and custards, drawings in bright colours dressing the TARDIS back to her joyful Ponds’ interior. Baby face again. Clara in a way cannot compete with childhood, the time when the greater number of his family was alive, when lessons were not taken seriously. But she can carry and protect him through dark his final years and eventually letting him cross. The most magic governess, she leads him from the oldest he had been, riddled with grief and on a cloud, retired, to his beginning, back to the Amelia. Mrs. Kislet reverted back to a child when Clara was rescued, as Eleven when Clara rescued him.

Clara-coffin lead him through his deaths in The Name of the Doctor, guided him out of his hell in The Day of the Doctor and delivered him back to life in The Time of the Doctor. The coffin always releases the body, be it in the afterlife or back to life, after a transformation that equates the coffin to the stomach or the alembic. Clara brought him back to the world, first in TS, then in TTotD. And series eight opens with a rebirth in a future graveyard. Whether or not a price will have to be paid for this rebirth remains to be seen; Clara has always ensured neither life nor death was robbed.

**Maybe Clara does stand as an anti-Pandora. She is “perfect”, the gift to the Doctor to bring him back to Earth, when, unlucky Prometheus, he was robbed of his fiery Ponds by the Universe. She comes with the wish to see the stars and a word that shows him the Universe still cares. She is the box fashioned after and by herself to remind the Doctor of what he did for humanity, to bring back balance.**

(Can I add a mean note at the end of the meta and curse Steven Moffat for giving similar titles to THREE different episodes? Because I tell you, this wasn’t remotely manageable when you need to ensure you talk about the right episode.) 


End file.
